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Getting the news about her mother's death felt a little like falling in love.
After the phone call came and went, Agatha left her glass cage corner office and locked herself in the bathroom. She pressed her forehead against the glossy tiles of the wall. A smile cracked her face wide open. She let herself revel, just for a moment, because she deserved it. For being patient, for putting up with all that corporate bullshit.
Fucking finally.
When her skin stopped humming and the corners of her mouth started to twitch, Agatha turned to the mirror. She smudged her mascara with the back of her hand, ready to yank at the rat tail of tasks that followed a well-planned matricide.
She started by making another call on the drive to her apartment, to deal with the medical examiner and his jackassery. Heart attack, no autopsy necessary, so sorry for your loss.
Easy, like kicking a toddler down the stairs.
It was the one useful thing her mother had taught her: to pretend to be something she wasn't. To slip into whatever role, like putting on a pair of shoes, no matter if it was comfortable or blistered. On that beautiful day, Agatha was a grieving daughter. Sensible Chelsea boots, matte leather, two inch heels.
The next stage of her plan: The River of Life Funeral Home. A detached red brick building stained green with neglect. Ivy suffocated its walls. Dust caked the windows. It was the sort of place that buried people nobody gave two shits about.
She stepped out of her car and through the door five minutes before closing. The world, the flesh, and the devil clung to her little black number and messy hair.
"Hello," she sniffled after an electric bell screeched overhead. "I know you're about to close, but-"
Agatha stopped short. There hadn't been any pictures of the funeral home online. Only a bug-infested website, a two star rating on Maps, and four bad reviews. One of them said the owner was a creepy lurker. Agatha had expected a geriatric dump. Complete with soggy wallpaper, plastic flowers, and a vaguely necrophilic mortician.
She curled her toes in the grieving daughter's sensible boots as she watched and recalculated.
The entrance room was nice. Modern and inviting, if a little humid. Every surface was covered with plants, shelves upon shelves of them. There were glossy ones, and spiky ones, and climbing ones. All of which Agatha couldn't name but felt she'd seen on Instagram.
They were background noise compared to the centerpiece.
The mortician—she was thirty, maybe—sat cross legged on the height-adjustable reception desk. A laptop roared on her knees. Her eyes snapped up when Agatha approached; they were knives dipped in chocolate. She wore a fitted blouse and slacks; black, professional. But the shoelaces of her docs were untied and her smile was too wide.
She had a small gap between her front teeth. Agatha wanted to lick it.
"I'm here to collect my mother's death certificate," she caught herself, adding a quiver to her lip as she picked up her game. A game that was quickly amended from grieving, to grieving beautifully. "Evanora Harkness. She passed this morning."
The mortician blinked twice, snapped her laptop shut, and unfolded her long legs. She let them dangle from the edge of the desk and hummed:
"I see. Would you like to sit down? Have some tea of coffee?"
Her voice wasn't unkind, exactly. But there was a cheer to it that clashed with the gray-scale brochures propped up next to the curve of her thigh. ALL ABOUT CREMATION and A GOOD DEATH.
A good death, indeed. Good for Agatha, anyway.
"I don't think I could keep anything down," she rasped. She made a show of fumbling for her ID in her purse. Let a used tissue fall to the floor. "Can you please just hand me the paperwork and I'll get out of your hair?"
The mortician had pretty hair, she thought. Almost black. Sleek and shiny where Agatha's was wild. If the occasion were different, she would've liked to get into that hair. Pull it just hard enough to see if the other woman would laugh or bite her hand off.
"Nope," The funeral director shrugged. "I'm going to need some information from you. So you should come and sit. Wouldn't want to holler back and forth through the hall, right?" She hopped off the desk, shooting Agatha a wink: "Follow me, we'll get the paperwork started."
Maybe she was a laugher and a biter. Agatha refused to be charmed. But she did follow. What else was she supposed to do? Compromise her confidence by making a snarky remark, apparently:
"Aren't funeral directors supposed to have gravitas? Be comforting?"
The woman looked back at her without missing a step, hand on the doorframe at the end of the hall. There was curiosity in the crinkle of her eyes:
"Do you want to be comforted?"
Yes. No. What kind of question was that? Agatha fixed her expression, relaxed her jaw. Said nothing. She sat down on the offered chair in the funeral home's back office, a room so small it didn't deserve the title.
Agatha shrunk herself to match it. Shoulders slumped forward, she crossed her arms in a too familiar self-hug. Her chin dropped nearly to her chest. She folded all that personality into a tired little person. A twenty-five year old orphan held together by gravity and guesswork.
She waited for the mortician to speak first.
The mortician waited too, for god knows what. Her smile was getting less sexy and more annoying by the minute. No, that was a lie. It was still sexy, dammit. There was a clock on the wall somewhere behind Agatha. The second hand ticked away, in tune with the pulse at her temple. Really, how hard could it be to go over some paperwork and not stare at your customers like a lunatic in the process?
After a while, the funeral director parted her lips and let out a breathy chuckle.
"My name's Rio Vidal," she said. Her fingernail—it was painted with chipped black polish—traced a long scratch on the cluttered table. This one was wooden, ancient. "I was the one who picked up your mother this morning, after the medical examiner gave the all clear. And with your permission I will be preparing her for her funeral."
The woman, Rio, gathered heaps of paperwork from the desk and deposited them on the windowsill behind her office chair. Agatha tried to catch some of the titles; it was mostly bills and the like. Some takeout menus. But there were 'thank you' cards, too.
Having made enough space for her pointy elbows, Rio leaned on them and added:
"And I'll answer any questions you have, of course."
Agatha didn't have questions. She wouldn't have come here if she didn't have it all figured out. She wanted the paperwork over with and her butt parked in the seat of a plane. Collect her inheritance and go someplace nice and warm. Spain maybe, or Greece. Somewhere with good wine and beautiful women. Well…beautiful women who weren't also irritating as hell.
But needs must. She let some tears slip, before wiping at them with her sleeve. Damn, she wished she was a natural pretty crier. Not that she cried, naturally.
"Mother wanted to be cremated," she lied, swallowing hard and shaking her head. "She hated the thought of rotting in the ground."
Rio looked at her like that was a hilarious thing to say, tongue digging into the hollow of her cheek:
"That can be arranged. I have a crematorium on the premises. But there are other things we should discuss first."
"Like what?" Agatha asked. She pulled another bunched up tissue from her purse and blew her nose. This was the part where she expected the exploitation of her grief to start. Payment plans, casket options, and the like. Maybe even funeral security details, an extra bump to the price for controversial public figures like Evanora Harkness.
Agatha should have known better, having met the mortician.
"Like this." Rio pulled a small square of yellow paper from her breast pocket and held it up. Written on it were two words in familiar, spiky, letters:
Agatha's fault.
"I found it on her body when I got her settled today. Wanna talk about it?"
The pulse tried to jump out of Agatha's temple. The edges of her vision tinted and smudged. A jolt of nausea stabbed her gut, her mother's bark rung in her ears. This is your fault! I should have killed you the moment you left my body. For just a moment, Agatha lost her footing, floundering somewhere between floating and falling.
"Agatha's fault," she hissed through her teeth, fingers digging half-moons into the soft flesh of her arms. "Of course she would write that! She could have been trampled to death by an army of rats on the subway and still found a way to blame it on me. This means nothing."
Her voice evened out by the time she reached the last sentence. The crack patched up as fast as it appeared. But the pure delight pouring out of Rio Vidal told Agatha all she needed to know. She was fucked. Which was a bad position for someone who usually did the fucking.
"She was a shitty person, huh? Thought so, from seeing her on the news and all."
Of course the mortician knew about the scandals. The law suits. A greasy old guy, a proper creepy lurker, wouldn't have cared. But Rio? With her plants and black nail polish? The environmentalist hero complex was practically tattooed on her pretty face.
The mortician still held the note. Dangled it from her fingertips like bait. Agatha couldn't look at it anymore. She wanted her to bite? She would.
She snatched the paper from Rio's hand, crushed it into a ball, stuck it into her mouth, and swallowed without chewing. It tasted like glue.
Rio didn't even blink: "You know…even if I thought you were innocent until now, this didn't work in you favor."
"Fuck off. I didn't kill her. She just likes—liked—to hurt me."
She hadn't meant to say that. Agatha ground her teeth, she felt like a raw nerve. But she needed to get a grip. Right now.
The grieving daughter angle wouldn't work anymore. Useless Chelsea boots, they'd go in the trash. She might as well lay the abused daughter on thick now. Her least favorite of them all, walking barefoot on steaming asphalt.
"Plenty of people have abusive parents. Most of them don't murder them. That's what therapy is for."
The way Agatha's voice cracked over the word abusive was part of the act. She was that good of an actress.
"There's not enough therapy for whatever you've got going on. You're not most people. I think you, Agatha Harkness, are exceptional."
Agatha knew when a woman was flirting with her. She'd had her share of failed relationships and mediocre one night stands. And Rio wasn't even trying to be subtle about it. But the juxtaposition of 'flirting' and 'funeral home' left her—not surprised, exactly. She'd thought about sleeping with Rio as soon as she saw her. But usually other people's brains didn't connect with the mess in her own. Something about chemistry. Or pathology. Maybe both.
Rio Vidal was a strange, strange, woman. And Agatha had no idea what to do with her. Or maybe she had too many ideas, none of them safe or sane. All of them chipped away at her focus.
"I would never hurt anyone," she choked out. A picture of righteous outrage. Except she wanted to hurt Rio. She wanted to bite that flushed patch of skin where the mortician's neck met her shoulder, hard enough to bleed; to scar.
"Oh, I'm sure it didn't hurt. Hurt leaves evidence, doesn't it?" Rio leaned back.
Agatha couldn't believably stay at this point. She shot up in her chair, its legs scraped against the floor.
"You're insane! I'll have someone else pick her up." She was already in the hall when Rio called after her.
"You switched out her heart meds with identical looking placebos!"
"What?" Agatha turned on her heel. This was the third time Rio had caught her of guard. She hated it.
She marched back into the office and sat down on the edge of the chair: "What did you say?"
"You messed with her medication. It's a patience game. But you'd still get rid of her decades before her time. That's how I would've done it…well, no. I would have poisoned her. But I can respect it, city girl."
Stop talking dirty to me, the words lay on Agatha's tongue. But she swallowed them just as she had the note. Just as the impulse to chew the other woman's face off.
Agatha wasn't the grieving daughter. Right now, she wasn't even the abused daughter. She pulled the heiress to the front. The one that should've worn glossy heels, sharp enough to stab someone with. Make-up precise and fit for a cover shoot. She didn't, at the moment, and maybe that was her downfall.
Aesthetics meant a shitton to a good confidence game.
"How much?" she asked, crossing one leg over the other.
"How much what?"
"How much money will it take for you to not sell your pretty little lie to the papers?"
The note wouldn't mean anything in court, of course. And Agatha had switched the placebos back to real pills when she picked up the keys for her mother's house. But the papers would eat this up, and Agatha didn't want a shitstorm. Not now, not ever. She'd fade into obscurity. Or become an A-list actress. Either way, her mother's name didn't deserve to be more than a footnote in her life.
But Rio Vidal didn't take the bribe. She started laughing. Not cruelly, and not politely either. Her entire body was shaking behind the desk, as if Agatha's words had been completely absurd. As if Rio was some comic book villain. It was utterly deranged. The mortician's breath came in hiccups when she finally talked:
"I don't need your pretty pennies, Agatha."
Agatha hated the way her name sounded from Rio's mouth.
And she begged to differ. This place was in dire need of an overhaul. She could smell the rot in the walls. Right behind the fresh coat of paint.
"I have a lot of pennies."
"I'm sure you do."
"Well, what else do you want?" There had to be something. Or else the mortician would have gone straight to the press. And if there was something Agatha would find it. She would dig it out of Rio with her bare hands if she had to.
"Would you like to go for a drink sometime?"
Yes.
No.
"What?" Agatha lost control of her eyebrows as they arched upwards. Her mouth ran away from her mind: "Let me get this straight: You think I'm a cold blooded killer."
"There's nothing straight about it, but yeah."
"Right." There was no con good enough to make her play a straight girl. "And you want to take me on a date. As in the person you just alleged to be a murderer?"
"Yes."
"What's wrong with you?"
"Sooo many things. Say yes and find out. You'll like them, promise." Rio wiggled her eyebrows.
Agatha knew she would like all the issues Rio obviously had. She was halfway there already. But she shouldn't. She really, really shouldn't.
"This is you blackmailing me into a relationship then?"
"Never. Saying no is ok. I'm just shooting my shot."
Yeah right. If not a relationship, then this was about sex. Fucked up people wanted to fuck killers. That's what the true crime podcasts Agatha listened to in the bathtub said. Groupies in the courtroom. Prison weddings. All that batshit sorta stuff. And Rio was obviously all kinds of fucked up. Maybe even Agatha's kinds. She could deal with that…and maybe she could let herself like it too.
Agatha climbed on the desk, one leg on each side of Rio's lap, grabbed her by the collar and pressed their lips together. The mortician's mouth was soft and warm. She tasted like salt and chap stick. Agatha let go of her blouse and move her hand's to cup Rio's jaw.
"Am I kissing the real Agatha right now, or are you still pretending? Because I'm not really into spoiled rich girls, ya know. Schemers and murderers on the other hand…" Rio hummed into Agatha's mouth, fingers rubbing circles against her hips.
"I hate you. I didn't do it." Agatha pulled back enough to suck a bruise into the softest part of Rio's throat.
"You don't. You did." Rio breathed into her hair. "It's ok, I'm not gonna tell anyone."
"Why?"
"That's not my job. I just…deal with the aftermath."
A beat of silence. Agatha pushed her away. Hard. Hard enough to roll the office chair into the pile of papers on the windowsill, sending bills and cards and takeout menus flying.
"I don't need to be dealt with," she spat.
For the first time since she met her, Rio's confidence flickered and died. She pushed to her feet, grabbing Agatha's thighs before she could jump off the table.
Then she got in her face all serious:
"You're not the aftermath, Agatha. You're the trigger. And you're fucking perfect."
Agatha had often been told that she was triggering. By many different people, most of whom really meant it. Never like that though. Never in a way that gave birth to something mushy in her chest.
They did end up going for drinks after that. If you counted chucking discounter wine straight from the bottle while watching a body be cremated 'going for drinks'. But it was cozy, on that rickety metal bench where all softness came solely from each other.
Halfway through the night, Agatha unzipped her boots and threw them out of the window.
"I loathed these shoes," she explained at Rio's questioning glance, before grabbing the bottle once more.
"What's wrong with them?"
"They are a grieving daughters sensible boots. I'm not grieving."
Without a word, Rio toed off her scuffed docs, her socks were mismatched. One black and one green.
"You can wear mine."
And Agatha did. They were a half-size too big for her, and warm in a way that would have disgusted her if they'd been anyone's but Rio's. But they were Rio's. And Agatha found she could wear Rio's shoes and still feel like herself.
"No take backs," she said and bit the mortician's earlobe.
Maybe she wouldn't run off to Spain or Greece after all. Maybe she liked her wine cheap and her beautiful woman irritating as hell.